Philosopher, physicist, painter, and polyglot. At the age of 20, Camilla Ora is already all these things. And she’s eternally grateful to Caltech alumni—because, without their support, none of it would be possible.

Like many who come to Caltech to learn and explore, undergraduate Damien Bérubé dreams of changing the world with science and engineering. But his personal vision—the force that drives him in the classroom, the lab, and beyond—is an uncommon one.

When asked what makes his alma mater special, Roger Davisson (BS ’65, MS ’66) frames his thoughts with a literary allusion. “Walt Whitman wrote, ‘I contain multitudes,’” he says. “Well, Caltech contains multitudes. The Institute has some of the brightest and best minds, and they gather across disciplines in a way that I don’t think happens elsewhere. For a small school, the amount of stuff that’s going on is truly remarkable.”

Daniela Bonafede-Chhabra (BS ’84) looks back to her time at Caltech—including the three hours and 15 minutes she spent waiting for her supervisor to arrive on her first day of work—with boundless appreciation.

Even our most reliable ideas about how the universe works break down in certain domains. They can’t account for the weirdness of quantum mechanics or the recursive chaos of fractals. Hungry for answers, many researchers—including one Caltech undergraduate and her faculty mentor—aim to come up with a better explanation.